Marvell Unveils its New Octocore 64-Bit Mobile Processors for 2015

64-bit processors are all the rage in the mobile world nowadays, which makes sense given that Android 5.0 Lollipop is the first operating system from Google to officially support the new processing architecture. Google has been working toward moving Android to a more fluid and powerful experience, and 64-bit is one of the ways to make that happen. While we don’t have any 64-bit phones that run Android 5.0 Lollipop just yet Marvell is looking into getting their foot into that segment of the market, providing new high-performance-per-watt eight-core CPUs with a 64-bit architecture for the next generation of phones in 2015. The Armada Mobile PXA1936 System on a Chip puts ARM’s latest Cortex A53 64-bit processing architecture, ramps it up to eight cores and pushes the speed up to 1.5GHz for truly excellent performance designed for upper mid-range devices.

Bringing up the rest of the mid-range is support for 1080p displays, which is a significant display quality increase over the qHD or lower resolution displays that many cost-efficient phones nowadays use. Then there’s also support for 13 or 16mp camera sensors which brings up the standard 5 to 8mp cameras found in many cost-efficient phones as well. Audio performance and audio codec quality has been ramped up in Marvell’s newest chipset, and all sensor hubs and overall security has been enhanced as well. Lastly don’t forget about 5-mode 4G LTE connectivity, which is important since many cost-efficient phones now are generally just HSPA. All in all this is a significant step in the right direction for Marvell and one that should put them toe to toe with MediaTek and the low to mid-range Snapdragon chipsets in 2015.

Marvell is also looking to launch a lower cost and performance 64-bit chipset alongside the PXA1936. The lower cost unit will be the PXA1908 and is a quad-core running at 1.2GHz, so while it won’t be quite as fast as the 1.5GHz octo-core it likely won’t be a slouch of any kind. Marvell’s SoC’s all support TD-LTE, FDD-LTE, TD-SCDMA, WCDMA and GSM network spectrum which means these are chipsets designed to be released worldwide and in a large range of devices.